Smart-Trust introduces a new technological enabler for Mobile ID which drastically increases the reliability and trust levels of identity verification at European borders, thus increasing the security of member states. The platform is compatible with a seamless self-service experience based on biometrics on the move which provides freedom of movements to citizens while ensuring their privacy safeguarded according to Privacy by Design principles. Smart-Trust will simultaneously address the business needs of governments, airports, airlines and border police in major pilots in the international airports of Lisbon and Schiphol. After establishing requirements sought by the various stakeholders, and integrating the Smart-Trust platform into the airport and border control infrastructure, we will define KPIs for assessing the business cases and design experiments to measure them. Smart-Trust will be implemented by delivering an agile, highly configurable, modular and open architecture platform with the following robust, versatile and scalable core components: • Mobile ID services and app, mobile identity enrolment and verification services • TrustChain, a blockchain-based infra-structure to assert citizen transactions in a distributed and self-regulatory fashion • Workflow Orchestration, a workflow management component which caters for stakeholder-driven business rules • Analytics and Risk-Assessment, an industrial-strength real time analytics platform able to deliver professional customized monitoring dashboards as well as detecting passenger trends and anomalies. These components will be developed as part of Vision-Box’s overarching Services Platform and hence compatible with standard Vision-Box services such as Automated Border Control, including Advance Passenger Information Systems (APIS) and Entry-Exit System (EES), and Happy Flow, the first 100% self-service passenger processing system allowing passengers to go from curb to boarding by simple presenting their face.

Identity theft is rapidly expanding, causing substantial financial loss to millions of people all around the world. This invisible crime is also widespread across EU countries, where a growing number of citizens is targeted by sophisticated fraudulent attacks each year, both offline and online. 56% of Europeans have experienced at least one type of fraud in the last two years. European security officials speak of an “epidemic” created by a spike in demand from asylum-seekers and from terrorists carrying counterfeit documents to enter the EU. Security documents are increasingly being counterfeited or tampered with by criminals to facilitate transnational crime. The continued vulnerability of different types of identity and travel documents makes it extremely difficult to combat this problem. SafeTravellers value proposition aims at a) strengthening the security at the borders, b) improving the productivity of the Border Authorities and LEAs by providing them with the appropriate tools to combat identity fraud at the hardware, identity and travel document, and biometrics level, while c) offering a frictionless border crossing experience for EU/TCN citizens as they will not have to stop at the border checkpoints. SafeTravellers is both proposing a new way of citizen identification based on multiple biometrics instead of the problematic identity document, as well as an enhancement of the current way of identity verification at the borders through a set of tools that will detect attacks at the biometric hardware, identity and travel document fraud and attempts to falsify biometrics. The proposed solution is GDPR compliant and introduces various privacy-preserving mechanisms to safeguard the citizens' rights. Through the distributed European Multi-Biometric Data Space offered by SafeTravellers, each Member State will keep in its jurisdiction the personal data of its country nationals while allowing cross-border identity checks without transferring or revealing any biometric data.

The World Economic Forum suggests that transnational travel will increase by 50% over the next ten years, bringing the number of arrivals to 1.8bn by 2030 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the ever-increasing travel both on land and sea, delays and queues are often observed at cases where people are crossing border. These delays create huge frustration for the citizens and at the same time put extra burden to the border authorities’ staff. In Europe, airports have managed to improve to a certain extend the border crossing through the facial recognition booths for European citizens that own an RFID enabled passport, however there are still huge queues observed. For non-European citizens, the situation is even worse. The border control for land and sea are placing all the effort to the border authorities staff requiring from them to check the passports of the travellers as well as to control the luggage and baggage. Reasonably, even without huge number of travellers, large delays and queues are observed. ODYSSEUS will enable citizens to seamlessly cross the border without stopping, while reducing the workload and improving productivity for Border Guard Authorities by providing highly detailed risk analysis. ODYSSEUS will leverage the power of digital technology offering to citizens the appropriate tools to cross land and sea borders in a secure and seamless manner without stopping while equipping the border authorities with novel tools for secure identity verification and unobtrusive vehicle/luggage/cargo checks, eliminating long delays at border areas. The proposed technologies will allow citizens to cross borders without any intervention by just leveraging their smartphones combined with strong and continuous identity verification. Remote vehicle/luggage scanning through X-Rays and UAVs, will allow authorities to remotely perform the appropriate controls.

Though difficult to quantify, the variety of possible ID document frauds at borders is a reality that threatens politicians holding responsibility for borders as well as EU citizens. Based on the needs expressed by practitioners, the iMARS consortium has shaped a project that will: 1/ improve the operational capacity of passport application and border control operators by providing both - short-term adhoc solutions ensuring reliable passport application procedures - and mid-term solutions with no-reference and differential analysis solutions that can in particular detect manipulated and morphed passport images as well as document fraud. iMARS will provide: • Image morphing and manipulation attack detection solutions to assess ID documents validity against document fraud, during enrolment and renewal steps, as well as at the border crossing stations • Document verification and fraud detection solutions to support border guards in the verification process by providing mobile tools that can check document’s integrity To reach the targeted TRL6, these technologies will be validated in laboratory conditions using operational data collected from six border control sites (with border to countries outside EU). 2/ ensure the uptake of its outcomes after the project’s end. iMARS will: • promote usability/ergonomic aspects by providing training, guidelines and best practices to border guards and passport application officers • contribute to the ongoing standardisation efforts in the field of Presentation Attack Detection and face image quality • provide open access benchmarks (2 datasets with multiple enrolment morphed face images and border gate probe images) on a specific testing platform serving follow-on research activities • ensure that the technologies developed are accepted by citizens and respect privacy and legal EU regulations.